Re: git email From: parsing (was Re: [GIT PULL] Staging/IIO driver patches for 4.11-rc1)

[Jeff King <peff@peff.net>]

On Fri, Feb 24, 2017 at 12:03:45PM +0100, Geert Uytterhoeven wrote:

> > The problem isn't on the applying end, but rather on the generating end.
> > The From header in the attached mbox is:
> >
> >   From: =?us-ascii?B?PT9VVEYtOD9xP1NpbW9uPTIwU2FuZHN0cj1DMz1CNm0/PQ==?= <simon@nikanor.nu>
> 
> Slightly related, once in a while I get funny emails through
> git-commits-head@vger.kernel.org, where the subject is completely screwed up:
> 
>     Subject: \x64\x72\x6D\x2F\x74\x69\x6E\x79\x64\x72\x6D\x3A
> \x6D\x69\x70\x69\x2D\x64\x62\x69\x3A \x53\x69\x6C\x65\x6E\x63\x65\x3A
> ‘\x63\x6D\x64’ \x6D\x61\x79 \x62\x65

Sorry, I don't have a clue on that one.

If you have UTF-8 or other non-ASCII characters in your subject,
format-patch will correctly do the rfc2047 encoding (and it should
always use QP). And that would kick in here because of the UTF-8 quotes.

But that weird "\x" encoding is not in any mail standard I know of (and
certainly Git would never do it).

The odd thing is that the quotes themselves _aren't_ encoded. Just
everything else.

One other feature is that subject line is long enough (especially
QP-encoded) that it spans two lines:

  $ git format-patch --stdout -1 b401f34314d | grep -A1 ^Subject
  Subject: [PATCH] =?UTF-8?q?drm/tinydrm:=20mipi-dbi:=20Silence:=20=E2=80=98?=
   =?UTF-8?q?cmd=E2=80=99=20may=20be=20used=20uninitialized?=

It's possible that something along the way is mis-handling subjects with
line-continuation (though why it would escape those characters, I don't
know).

> and some of the mail headers end up in the body as well:
> 
>     =?UTF-8?Q?\x75\x73\x65\x64_\x75\x6E\x69\x6E\x69\x74\x69\x61\x6C\x69\x7A\x65\x64?=

That might be related to the whitespace continuation (the first line
after the break is the second line of the subject).

-Peff